Urological litigation trends in the UK National Health Service: an analysis of claims over 20 years.

OBJECTIVE

To look into the urology litigation trends and successful claims in the National Health Service (NHS) over the last 20 years.

METHODS

We requested data from NHS Resolutions to investigate current litigation numbers, costs and causes for claims. Data collected included the number of claims dating from 1996 to 2019, the total sum of damages paid out each year for urology and the causes for the claims dating from 2009 to 2019. Data from NHS Resolutions were analysed, stratified and categorized by the authors from this information, which was provided as two separate documents.

RESULTS

The total cost of damages between 1997 and 2017 was £74.5m (range: £241 325-£7.8m per year). While the number of successful claims was 1653 (range 7-168 per year), the total number of claims was 3341 (range 31-347 per year) and, over time, this has increased almost sevenfold. The cost of damages has increased roughly in line with the number of claims. Over the last 10 years, non-operative-related claims accounted for 984 claims, of which the largest subset was for 'the failure to diagnose and/or treat' (n = 639, 65%), with 88 (9%) successful consent-related claims. There were 226 intra-operative-related claims. Of these, wrong-site surgery, a never-event, accounted for eight claims and there were six successful claims for failing to supervise juniors. A total of 1129 claims were postoperative claims, with retained foreign body or instrument accounting for 71 (6%) of these.

CONCLUSIONS

The number and cost of litigation claims have increased year on year. There is a need for continual improvement in patient care, surgical training, counselling, informed consent and early management of complications. The evidence reviewed in this paper suggests that the best approach to this is the combination of rigid adherence to and re-enforcement of common surgical guidelines and implementation of the national 'Getting it right first time' initiative.